Global Warming: Is There Anything It Can't Do?

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Global Warming: Is There Anything It Can't Do?

The general interest newsmagazines of the world have been in serious decline for years. Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report — what ever happened to them? Although all of them still exist in some form, they are all shadows of their former selves.

But then there is The Economist of London. These people put out what at least looks on the surface to be a serious print edition every week. They devote real resources to gathering news from around the world. If you want to find out what’s going on in, say, Argentina or the Congo or Uganda, this is one of the few places that you can find it. But can you trust anything they say?

I’ve been a long-time subscriber to The Economist, and had long regarded them as relatively sensible, generally less infected by leftist groupthink than most mainstream sources. But then, a few years ago — I can’t pinpoint the exact date — they made what appears to be a corporate-level decision to go all in for global warming alarm. Henceforth, every issue would contain one or several global warming stories, always with the slant of trying to scare the readership about the allegedly terrible crisis at hand.

Since then, it’s been a steady downhill slide. But how low can this go? In the issue of May 25-31, 2019, we seem to have hit bottom, with an editorial headlined “How to think about global warming and war.” Yes, they have now descended to attempting to blame all world warfare and strife on the universal bogeyman of “global warming.” . . .

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What's The Potential Bipartisan Compromise On "Climate" Policy?

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What's The Potential Bipartisan Compromise On "Climate" Policy?

Many bemoan how our political culture has become increasingly and perhaps irretrievably polarized in recent years. Seemingly all of Washington consists of nothing but two sides endlessly screaming at each other. What happened to what once were the regular outbreaks of “bipartisanship”? Can’t these people work together any more to “get things done”?

For myself, I’ve never been much of a fan of “bipartisanship” or “getting things done” in Washington. Almost always, these are euphemisms for adding to the government’s budget and to counter-productive programs, albeit a little more slowly than the Democrats would have liked. How about getting less done in Washington, and letting the states, or the people individually, take care of these things?

But suppose you are a fan of the growth of government and its spending as the route to solve all the big problems of the world. Then the “climate change” mantra may well seem to you like a godsend. Here is a catch-all slogan that can be used to advocate for most or all of your major goals, while bringing to the mix a claim of moral necessity and urgency that many people, especially young people, find politically irresistible. Do you want to have the government take a more active role in maintaining and improving the environment? How about a more active role to make industry or agriculture or transportation more “sustainable”? How about to thwart capitalism and bring about a more just and fair society organized on a socialist model? How about to redistribute income from rich to poor? Make it all about “climate change.” Now you’re not just playing to envy and using taxpayer dollars to buy votes. You’re fighting to “save the planet”! The moral high ground is yours. . . .

But there is a fundamental problem here in trying to reach any kind of half-way compromise on an emissions reduction program intended to affect the climate. The problem is that the whole concept of affecting the world’s climate through attempted emissions reductions quite obviously doesn’t make any sense at all except on the very grandest of scales. Halfway (or ten percent of the way) measures are completely useless. . . .

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More Excitement In The Air In New York: Rent Regulation To Be Expanded And Tightened

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A couple of months ago I wrote about the excitement in the air in New York City as the newly elected state legislature, with large progressive Democrat majorities in both houses for the first time in many years, looked set to pass a “pied-à-terre” tax for New York City on high value condos owned by non-residents. Finally, we were going to get even with those evil out-of-town mega-billionaires for their sin of coming to our city and spending their money. The idea was that the state legislature would authorize the City to impose special real estate tax surcharges thought sufficient to raise some $650 million per year from just 5400 super-wealthy people who owned very-high-value residences. That would be some $120,000 per year from each one of them. Take that, billionaires! One guy — a hedge funder from Chicago named Ken Griffin, who had just bought an apartment on “billionaire’s row” for $263 million — was theoretically going to get socked for about $10 million per year.

And then, as quickly as it had arisen, the excitement dissipated. Somebody noticed that the high end condo market in Manhattan was already in sharp decline. This tax threatened to kill it off completely, along with the jobs of the people building and selling the apartments. Meanwhile, the tax looked to be relatively easy to evade, as by a mega-billionaire subleasing his apartment and staying in a big hotel suite. The originally-$650 billion estimated annual tax take started to drop like a stone. Today, the pied-à-terre tax idea seems to have died, although with the legislature still in session anything could happen.

But suddenly a new excitement is rising up. A key progressive agenda item, tighter and stricter rent regulation, long blocked by the formerly Republican-controlled state Senate, now looks set to sail through before the legislature winds up in June. Finally, we will be able to achieve perfect justice and fairness in rental housing prices, through the magic of government command and control. . . .

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How Corrupt Is The New York "Affordable Housing" Game?

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How Corrupt Is The New York "Affordable Housing" Game?

In New York City we have a dizzying array of taxpayer-subsidized “affordable housing” schemes: low income public housing; mixed income public housing; “limited equity” co-ops; the so-called “Mitchell-Lama” program; 80/20 and 70/30 “inclusionary zoning” requirements; and plenty more. Something around 1 million people live in one type or another of these subsidized projects. That would be about 1 person out of eight in the City.

The whole idea with these schemes is that each resident pays substantially less than what would be the market rent for the same unit. After all, by hypothesis, we have a “crisis” of housing cost, where market rate apartments are priced too high for many people to afford. Therefore, we need politicians to provide taxpayer-financed subsidies to create a large tier of the “affordable” apartments. The actual rents for each “affordable" apartment are then determined by a political rather than a market process. In the case of the low-income projects, the rent is set as 30% of the tenant’s income, meaning that a tenant with no income could pay as little as nothing in rent, even when the apartment is in a desirable location. Other apartments in different programs first have a rent set, and then are allocated to people whose income has been determined to be appropriate for that rent. Sometimes these politically-determined rents might be relatively close to a market rent for a comparable apartment in the same area; but other times the “affordable” apartments are located in desirable areas, and the local market rent for a comparable apartment could exceed the “affordable” rent by a factor of five, ten, or even more. Such disparities occur, for example, in desirable Manhattan neighborhoods, as well as in waterfront areas in Manhattan and also Brooklyn.

So we have large numbers of apartments that would have market rents of perhaps $3000 up to even $10,000 per month, going for perhaps $500 to $1500. Of course, long waiting lists develop for these subsidized apartments. Some designated political gatekeeper gets to decide who gets the next apartment when it becomes available. Now, what is the chance that such a process can proceed for years and decades without pervasive corruption? . . .

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The New York Times Does "What Went Wrong In Venezuela?"

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In the past couple of weeks, the New York Times has had two big articles about Venezuela, describing the horrific conditions that now exist there, and analyzing what went wrong. On May 14, it was “How Venezuela Stumbled to the Brink of Collapse”; and on May 17 it was “Venezuela’s Collapse Is the Worst Outside of War in Decades, Economists Say.”

It will not surprise you that the word “socialism” does not appear in either article. But the stupidity here goes far beyond just not mentioning the subject of “socialism.” The affirmative effort in these articles is to somehow shift the blame for Venezuela’s economic collapse to something other than socialism, whether it be “poor governance,” corruption, or general incompetence. The May 17 piece does have a reference to “misguided policies,” but they never say what those “misguided policies” may be. Widespread nationalizations of industry? Massive public housing schemes? Heavily subsidized food and household products? “Free” healthcare? None of these are mentioned.

But of course they do mention — multiple times — the Trump administration’s sanctions, just imposed in the past couple of months, as if those have something meaningful to do with a 60-80% collapse of GDP that has taken place over a decade or more.

From a summary in the May 17 piece: . . .

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So Who Are The Stupid Ones Down In Australia?

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On Saturday, there was a big national election in Australia. All seats for the parliament were up. The incumbent Prime Minister, running for re-election, was Scott Morrison of the Liberal Party (we would call them conservatives). The opposition Labor Party, whose candidate for PM was a guy named Bill Shorten, explicitly ran a campaign focused on the issue of climate change.

Going into the election, all polls had Labor ahead (although some by margins as small as 2-3 points). But in the end, Morrison and the Liberals (in coalition with other small parties) won a clear, if somewhat narrow, victory.

Labor clearly thought that running on the issue of “climate change” was the sure route to victory. They frequently referred to the contest as the “Climate Change Election.” They accused the Liberals of lacking any credible plan to attack climate change. And they devised detailed proposals that they called their “Climate Change Action Plan.” Here is a summary; and here is the full Plan. The idea was to force massive cuts in Australians’ CO2 emissions in an effort to “save the planet.” From the Overview in the Plan:

Failure to act on climate change will expose the Australian people and environment to devastating costs for our economy, society, security, health and environment. Experts at the ANU, University of Melbourne and CSIRO estimate failing to keep global warming to below two degrees will eventually cost the average Australian household $14,000 per year.

The promised “action on climate change” boiled down to a forced reduction in Australia’s CO2 emissions by 45% (on 2005 levels) by 2030, and “net zero” emissions by 2050. And how was that to be accomplished? . . .

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